“Listen to the great workingman, salt of the earth, himself.” Eliot stretched out his sturdy legs and for a moment took a profound interest in bending his big toes—remarkably flexible digits that he was able to move as if they were thumbs, that is, independently of the smaller toes. With them, he could pick up small objects like a pencil or a jackknife, even a drinking cup if the handle was wide enough. “If he’d just been a little bit nice this morning. Slapped us on the back, told us to have a fine time and to send postals and to wire him if we got in a fix. But it was just that …” His voice dropped an octave. “ ‘Don’t want to see your faces till September …’ It was like he … You know …”

“Yeah, yeah, it was,” Drew said.

“I must’ve missed something. Like what?”

Drew only answered, “You know, Nat,” and then gave a quick shrug, while his lower lip curled over the upper. Looking at him, Nathaniel felt his jaw tighten of its own will.

“Like what, little man?”

“Like he said he didn’t want to see us till the fall only because he didn’t have the nerve to tell us the truth. That he doesn’t give a darn if he sees us again ever.”

There was a long silence before Nathaniel said:

“Boy, you talk about things that wouldn’t be said if he was on board.”

“I’ve said it when he was. Sort of.”

Nathaniel assumed he was referring to last year, on the homeward leg from Halifax, Cyrus driving Double Eagle hard in a doublereef sou’wester and shouting exultantly above the wind and the thrum of rigging taut as fiddle strings. Ah, she’s got a bone in her teeth now, don’t she, boys? Drew wasn’t there to hear him; he lay below, fighting nausea brought on as much by terror of the advancing waves as he was by the motion of the boat. We should be hove to in a wind like this, he groaned, when Nathaniel came down off watch in drippings oilers. He’s trying to drown us, Nat. And then Nathaniel, laughing: Well, if that’s true, then he’s trying to commit suicide, too.

“You didn’t say it where he could hear it, and anyway, you didn’t mean it.”

Drew cocked his jaw defiantly.

“No, not drown us really. I meant that he didn’t give a da—a darn about us. He didn’t then, doesn’t now.”

“Maybe he doesn’t give a damn about you, because you’re such a goddamned little lamb about things,” Nathaniel said.

Now Drew displayed one of the mannerisms he found unendurable: looked at him the way Trajan did when the cat wanted to be petted, except that plaintiveness in Drew’s eyes somehow invited a slap, a kick, a wounding word.